Being Eccentric and Creative

A post about the documentary “American Masters: The Women’s List” quotes Alicia Keys:

“I love the concept of rebel… sometimes you will find yourself almost being told what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do, what women don’t do, what women aren’t supposed to do.

“You will hear a lot of those things… I find that to be just because people are totally and utterly fearful, and we are so, so incredibly capable to do everything that we can possibly imagine, and the things that we don’t even know that we can do, we can do that too.”

Being eccentric – choosing not to be more safely mundane – can help our creative thinking and courage.

As psychologist Robert Ornstein, PhD has noted, “If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different.”

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Karl Lagerfeld, the prominent fashion designer, photographer, publisher, and artistic director of Chanel, has eclectic and unusual tastes in clothing – so I would consider him one example of an eccentric.

A profile article notes that in his home there is “a narrow room lined with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps two hundred pairs of fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to color (he explained that he chose the gray pair he’s wearing because of the overcast sky).

“There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid out by the hundred. Next door was a windowless room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one stuffed with suits—perhaps five hundred in all—in black or gray hues.”

Lagerfeld admits, “I have suits here I’ve never worn. To normal people it may look sick, huh?” He shrugged. “I don’t know what ‘normal’ means, anyway.”

[From In the Now – Where Karl Lagerfeld lives. By John Colapinto, New Yorker, March 19, 2007.]

[Photo: he is apparently also a book collector.]

Probably a number of people, including perhaps mental health professionals, would consider some of this behavior “sick” or neurotic.

Some of what he said reminds me of the A&E TV program Hoarders, which “looks inside the lives whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis.”

Another example of a creative leader is mentioned by historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who says Beethoven’s apartments numbered more than 60, as he kept moving on to a new one. That item is from Boorstin’s book Creators – a History of Heroes of the Imagination – and quoted in my article Eccentricity and Creativity.

British neuropsychologist David Weeks studied and interviewed a wide range of such “daring and different” people for his book Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, and concluded “One of the principal reasons eccentrics continually challenge the established order is because they want to experiment, to try out new ways of doing things.”

And that may be one of the key benefits of being eccentric (which, of course, is often “in the eye of the beholder”) – that it can open up your thinking to try out new and different approaches to creative challenges.

Tim Burton

His films are almost always satisfying and exciting to me on multiple levels. What are some of the aspects of Tim Burton’s life and way of working that help him be so creative?

Costume designer Colleen Atwood also admires Burton as an artist, and explains: “He is able to open himself up to the world, through his own world, which is very unusual. His work has a very separate and personal voice and it comes from a very true place. At the same time it’s incredibly entertaining.”

Burton has commented on the importance of inner drive: “The tricky thing about being in the entertainment industry is that basically no matter how much money is involved, how good the life is, the thing that still compels you is that thing inside.”

“Both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase cognitive disinhibition — the brain’s failure to filter out extraneous information.”

She explains, “When unfiltered information reaches conscious awareness in the brains of people who are highly intelligent and can process this information without being overwhelmed, it may lead to exceptional insights and sensations.”

Carson writes about “one of the world’s best known and most successful entrepreneurs, with hundreds of patents to his name—including the Segway scooter. But you will never see Dean Kamen in a suit and tie: the eccentric inventor dresses almost exclusively in denim.”

She also mentions other unusual behaviors: “He spent five years in college before dropping out, does not take vacations and has never married.

“Kamen presides (along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism) over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has ‘seceded’ from the U.S. and dispenses its own currency in units of pi. Visitors are issued a visa form that includes spaces on which to note identifying marks on both their face and buttocks.”

Graham Moore won an Academy Award for his adapted screenplay for “The Imitation Game,” the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptanalyst who led a team in England that developed one of the first computers, which enabled decoding of the “unbreakable” Nazi Enigma code machine.

In his acceptance speech Feb 22, 2015, Moore said:

“Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. And I do, and that’s the most unfair thing I think I’ve ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I want to use it to do is to say this: When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself. Because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here.

“And so I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere. Yes, you do. I promise you do, you do. Stay weird, stay different, and when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along.”

The movie (Director: Tim Burton) is due in theaters September 30, 2016.

“When Jacob discovers clues to a mystery that spans different worlds and times, he finds Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. But the mystery and danger deepen as he gets to know the residents and learns about their special powers.” (imdb)

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” – Nietzsche

Nonconformity and the Creative Life – video from Shots of Awe YouTube channel by Jason Silva

Jason Silva comments: “We are all free to create our own reality. But it’s only when we are bold enough to decondition our thinking — to transcend what Robert Anton Wilson calls the reality tunnel — this linguistic, and conceptual, and symbolic framework that constructs your realities, and a matrix pulled in front of your eyes, blinding you from ecstatic visions of what might be behind those walls…”

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Stony Brook University press release:

“Building on previous brain imaging research that revealed cultural influences play a role in neural activation during perception, Arthur Aron, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and colleagues, completed a study that suggests individuals who are highly sensitive have cognitive responses that appear to not be influenced by culture at all.”

Article: Misfits and Innovators“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” Steve Jobs
According to some writers and research, some of the “big names” of creativity and innovation share personal qualities with various sorts of “misfits.”

About Douglas Eby

Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the Talent Development Resources series of sites including High Ability; Highly Sensitive and Creative; The Creative Mind and others - which provide "Information and inspiration to enhance creativity and personal development." Also see Résumé.

Developing Multiple Talents: The personal side of creative expressionby Douglas Eby
"One of many reviews: "Part book about creativity, part compendium of useful tidbits, quotations and research, and part annotated bibliography, this is a wildly useful and highly entertaining resource." - Stephanie S. Tolan, fiction writer and consultant on the needs of the gifted. -- See About the book for more.